Making feminist sense of militarisation of the mind

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Tiina Vaittinen also took part in the letter writing, but was unable to participate in the writing of this piece due to her academic career coming to an end. Commenting on a previous draft, she asked: ‘How did we ever give up writing letters? Now, that Finland is much worse – having joined the big NATO-allies’ efforts to bring down the international rule-based order by disregarding International Court of Justice interim orders to prevent genocide in Gaza – should we not write letters like our lives depended on it? Why don’t we? Did we give up? Please, can someone tell me that we did not give up just yet … ’

2. A traditional Finnish swear word, which many prefer because it sounds very strong because of the rolling r. Refers to the devil.

Additional information

Funding

NOS-HS Workshop Grant awarded by the Joint Committee for Nordic research councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences [Grant number 135988: Feminisms and Wars Community]

Notes on contributors

Susanna Hast

Susanna Hast is a writer, songwriter and researcher. She has the title of associate professor in artistic research at Uniarts Helsinki. Susanna has studied war experience, military training, capoeira, trauma and subtle resistance to violence. She published the novel Body of Evidence (Ruumis/huoneet, S&S) in 2022 and has released two music albums.

Noora Kotilainen

Noora Kotilainen (D.Soc.Sci) is a historian and a social scientist. Her focus is on international politics, media and visuality. She has published on crises, wars, violence, suffering, humanitarianism, militarism, migration and photography. She works as a senior research fellow at the University of Helsinki and heads the Kone Foundation funded project “Language of military power within the Finnish democracy”.

Tiina Seppälä

Tiina Seppälä is an adjunct professor of international development studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She holds a PhD in International Relations (2010). Currently, she works as a lecturer of global development studies at the University of Helsinki. She is the author of Globalising Resistance against War (Routledge, 2012) and co-editor of Arts-Based Methods for Decolonising Participatory Research (Routledge, 2021) and Civil Disobedience from Nepal to Norway (Routledge, 2022).

Saara Särmä

Saara Särmä is a feminist writer, part-time academic, sometime artist, and occasional activist. Currently her academic work happens within the project Understanding Nordic Digital Order (UNDO) - Digitalisation of Policing in the Nordics, Activism, and Surveillance Oversight, funded by the Kone Foundation, and her office is located at TARU – Tampere University Research Centre for Communication Sciences.

Leena Vastapuu

Leena Vastapuu is an assistant professor in the area of gender, peace and security at the Swedish Defence University (SEDU). Her research concentrates on girl and women soldiers’ life trajectories in war and its aftermath, feminist theories of International Relations, as well as militarization of everyday life across the Nordics. Leena is the author of ‘Liberia’s Women Veterans: War, Roles and Reintegration’ (Zed Books 2018), and has published widely on gender, security and war.